


Doom Town

by fluorescentgrey



Series: In the Garden [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alaska, Complicated Relationships, Drug Addiction, Gen, Punk, Recreational Drug Use, Werewolf Culture, Wizard Rock, one scene with consent issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-23 03:42:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20001766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Ketchikan, Alaska; July 1985. Bill Montclair gets the band together.





	Doom Town

**Author's Note:**

> to skip the scene with consent issues, stop reading at the triple --'s and start reading at the next group of triple --'s.

1985\. Floating out of the car stereo were the beguiling tones of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again.” Nominally it was Montclair’s car (it was actually his mother’s, which they had taken without asking) but he was too bombed to drive. So was Lockett, probably, technically, but he was driving anyway. The music helped, and the rolled-down windows seeping the silt of Alaskan summer into the car, marginally reducing the overpowering odor of cigarettes and sweat. They had driven to Ketchikan through British Columbia by means of evading border agents and magical foolery. Similarly, they had gotten summer work at a salmon cannery. It was dangerous and paid well and played host mostly to young northwesterners dancing around the decision to take the left hand path. As such there was a guaranteed supply of drugs, and, for Montclair, people who might be enticed to come out under the full moon. 

One such person was named Devon Rice. He worked at the cannery further down the line, and he was from Anchorage. Montclair had noticed his Bad Brains shirt and they had discussed music on lunch break. “Where’s your friend,” Devon had asked. 

“Who?”

“The skinny kid — isn’t he — ”

“Lockett. Yeah — I don’t know. Dope sick, probably.” 

Some understanding passed over Devon’s face. He probably already knew Montclair and Lockett were living in their car, because about half the seasonal workers at the cannery lived in their cars. Montclair watched him process this further information. “You guys should come over,” he said. 

Devon lived with some people at the edge of town, on the way to the end of the road. The number of roads in the state of Alaska were limited by geography and other factors. On the way up they had had to take numerous ferries to places that simply could not be otherwise accessed. Neither Montclair nor Lockett had ever seen the ocean before, and in this place its whims seemed to dictate all human experience. Everybody worked on boats or in a plethora of industries supporting said work on boats. In what passed for downtown Ketchikan a great number of businesses offered laundry and shower services for deckhands coming off long hauls. The shoreline was rocky and strewn with salt-bleached driftwood like massive, unthinkable bones. When Montclair had gone to the library as a child to look at the National Geographics, he had looked hungrily at the beaches. He had thought about going to California and being a surfer, as allegedly his father had been, and driving back and forth along the PCH in a butter-yellow VW van with boards bungee-corded to the roof. Those were not like these beaches. 

Possibly because he was high or otherwise because of the fecund emerald tangle of greenery cleverly disguising all human intervention upon the landscape, Lockett missed the turnout Devon had meticulously described over the roar of the cannery machines and the high-powered hoses three times before Montclair noticed it and magically jerked the steering wheel out of Lockett’s grasp and toward the overgrown gravel path. The forest devoured them — the radio had long since blurred out into static —and then spat them out into a clearing which contained a strange dwelling. It was like a pile of junk that had grown into a house. At the sound of the engine and the wheels over gravel Devon Rice emerged from an unseen door. The summer was cool up here but all of his clothing was cut off (sleeves of the Black Flag shirt, hems of the heavy hunter-green canvas pants) and he was casually clutching a home-brewed beer in an unmarked dark bottle. Lockett parked the car amidst a shipwreck of junk. Outside it smelled like sea and mown grass. Devon came over and shook their hands and remarked with surprise on their having managed to drive Montclair’s mom’s piece-of-shit Volvo station wagon all the way from Idaho, and then they went inside. 

Evidently it had been a cabin or a shed at one time, and now it was something else. Various arms and wings extended like vines or tentacles and the omnipresent rainwater bled in through the right angles at the join of roof and wall, except where this had been marginally mitigated by judicious application of tarps or magic. This was something that Devon didn’t necessarily seem to realize he was doing. He invited Montclair and Lockett toward the center of the great maze, into one of the interior rooms somewhat more protected from the elements. Floating in the middle of the space was a decrepit mouldering couch which he ushered them into. Then he went off into one of the makeshift hallways to get something. 

Lockett got up from the swallowing couch with difficulty and crouched before the towering collection of tapes and records. He unearthed a first pressing of the Stooges’ _Raw Power_ which he passed reverently to Montclair. When he slid the vinyl out of the cardboard he saw it was covered in rancid dust and mold. Lockett returned to the couch, this time with a guitar he’d found in some shadowy corners. He proceeded to fumble his way through “Gimme Danger.” 

Devon came back with a bag of stale potato chips. “You guys play?” he asked casually. 

“What have you done to this invaluable piece of musical history?” Montclair asked in return, holding the moldy record aloft. 

Devon collapsed on the couch between them, bucking the ancient springs. “It’s not mine,” he said. “I think it belonged to Lawrence.”

“How many people live here?”

Lockett met Montclair’s eyes over Devon’s shoulder. Like, don’t start thinking about this yet. 

“Seven,” said Devon, “this summer. Not Lawrence anymore. He’s dead. You guys want to smoke a joint?”

They did. It was crooked from having been in Devon’s pocket, but the grass was good. Devon sparked it with his fingers and checked with his big brown bug-eyes to see if Lockett or Montclair had noticed. So, kind of ostentatiously, Lockett magically amplified the guitar. With extreme care he set about playing “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” 

Devon watched him for a minute. Then he looked to Montclair as though he might fucking start singing. At last he said, “You sure can play.”

“It’s three chords,” Lockett told him. 

“I play drums,” Devon said for some reason. “They’re in the back. We could jam.” 

“Maybe some other time,” said Montclair. He unrolled the bag of chips on the coffee table and plunged his hand into the greasy depths. Lockett started playing another song, which Montclair recognized from the folk cassettes he insisted on listening to while driving. It was “Cod’ine” by Buffy Sainte-Marie. “Is grass all you got?”

\--

Most nights, not that there were really nights, because instead of going down in the summer the sun just skirted the edge of the world, they parked the car at the edge of town in what was nominally a trailhead parking lot. Some nights they were alone there, and some nights there were other people passing through. Some other nights and mornings there were bears passing through. 

In the morning Lockett woke up and climbed out through the trunk hatch and quietly assembled the tiny Coleman grill. With matches and more than a little magic he got the charcoal burning and set about cooking sausages. Montclair woke up when one of the other transients came by and started talking to Lockett flirtatiously. Lockett always did this hilarious thing in these instances, which was to make himself seem very intelligent and aloof, like he had done too many mushrooms at one time, though none of these things were true. It had literally never worked, but Lockett was forced to keep trotting it out all the time because he couldn't think of anything else to do and something about him tended to appeal to old weirdos. 

Montclair lay in his sleeping bag listening and slowly stretching every limb. Eventually he realized Lockett was looking into the car and into his open eyes with an expression of desperation. Probably he didn’t even realize he was doing it. Try to pretend you’re not so damaged, Montclair had told him before. But still he made a big loud show of getting up and when he next looked outside the guy had taken one big step back from Lockett. When Montclair climbed out of the back hatch he could tell it was raining, but they couldn’t feel it under the heavy tree cover. Lockett crouched to turn the sausages on the grill and the transient said to Montclair, “Good morning.”

“Morning.”

This guy was looking down Lockett’s back to check if there was a gap at the waistband of his too-big jeans. Montclair tried to decide if this made him feel anything. It was kind of funny, and mostly pathetic that Lockett would never do anything clever about it, the way Montclair might have, if old weirdos were ever interested in him. It struck him that it would probably be easy to fake seduce this idiot and take his drug stash. He was really way too boring to kill by any other means, especially the best one. That one was saved to exercise judiciously. 

“What are you boys up to today,” said this guy. 

Lockett kind of huffed a laugh at the stupidity of this question and the obvious pivot. Montclair sat on the back bumper of the car and set about trying to detangle his hair. Eventually the guy went away. Lockett went to the backseat again and found a bowl into which he cut the sausages in sloppy knuckle-thick rounds, and a loaf of day-old bread from a dumpster, and some liquidy margarine. They ate mostly in silence except Lockett said, “He says he has pills.”

“Who, that guy?” 

“Yeah. He said benzos.”

These were not ideal but might be traded for what was ideal, possibly to Devon or other people who lived in the ramshackle house on the way to the end of the road. They would not be paid for another week so it was probably the best bet. 

\--

Lockett was not so much Montclair’s friend as, like, maybe, a fingernail he had bitten off that had developed sentience. He turned out of and into shadows. When they had first met he had had basically no personality except being poor and listening to Television and the Flying Burrito Brothers, but then nobody in western Idaho really had any personality. All the interim events hadn’t so much developed him as honed some sharp edge which cut into the world. Montclair didn’t doubt he had some kind of vibrant interior life but also wasn’t much interested in it. Sometimes they did not talk for many days. Sometimes he was pretty sure Lockett hated him and thought he might have preferred that, or at least the outward expression of that, though usually when they were together on the full moon they both woke up having nearly eviscerated one another. But then almost every morning Lockett would get up and make breakfast. He did things like make rainwater cassettes and stills out of garbage and hide them in the brush with magic and then go around at night to collect them. He was usually up late burning scrap wood to make the charcoal with which he fired the Coleman grill, sitting by the fire, high, reading Shakespeare or some shit. 

Sometimes Montclair caught sight of their reflections in darkened shop windows or broken fragments of rearview mirrors on sidewalks and in gutters and felt a funny thrill. They kind of looked like two of the horsemen of the apocalypse just wandering around the planet waiting in these decrepit yearning bodies for something unthinkable to happen. Perhaps this was why Montclair had eventually decided they should start a band. 

\--

On a Monday, before their shift, they went to the Red Anchor on the edge of town and ordered two plates of steak and eggs. It was coming around to that time of the month when one just wanted to eat meat, though Montclair had a better idea for how that could happen when the hour came round at last. They waited and then ate in silence and listened to the old fishermen and the deckhands coming off long sojourns into the sounds and the open ocean. Two of them had come off one of the larger fishing vessels under contract with the cannery, which had come to port in the night. 

Lockett looked over Montclair’s shoulder when the bell rang signaling the opening of the door. He met Montclair’s eyes in such a way that he was not surprised when Devon pulled over a chair from a neighboring table. Being a local and a regular he was doted upon by the staff, including the grandmotherly waitress whose grandmotherliness had not yet extended to Lockett and Montclair, though they were no more filthy or haggard or feral-looking than Devon was. To this point, she brought a coffee mug for Devon and filled it to the brim from a fresh pot and then promptly left without refreshing the dregs remaining in Lockett’s and Montclair’s cups. Lockett, at least, was used to this treatment. “It’s because you don’t tip,” he advised Montclair. 

“A tip is for good service, Schaff,” said Montclair. 

Devon was wearing a shirt with Aretha Franklin’s face on it. He smelled terrible because he had been up, he said, since 4am, having been called into the cannery early to deal with the new arrival. He worked on the part of the line where all he had to do was cut the fish up and shove it into the cans. Being newcomers from out of state, Lockett usually gutted the fish and Montclair sprayed their hollow bodies out with a powerful hose. Cutting the fish was an enviable position in comparison and reserved for those with tenure and experience. Devon explained this was technically his lunch break. Then he cut a big piece off Montclair’s steak and inhaled it in a single bite before Montclair could do anything about it. 

Montclair resolved to kill him. Lockett met his eyes again with the untranslatable expression that meant something like, _we can all hear that through your eyes and it’s scaring us._

“I’m having a party next week,” said Devon, chewing. “The fifteenth. When everybody’s paychecks come. Obviously you guys are welcome and if you want to bring anyone…” 

“You should do it the sixteenth,” Montclair said. The moon was full on the sixteenth. Because the sun didn't really go down here, Montclair wasn't quite sure what would happen, but he looked forward to finding out. Lockett dragged his knife across his plate meaningfully, but Montclair continued. “Saturday night is better for a party.” 

“Okay,” said Devon, “cool, cool. Yeah. Saturday night _is_ better for a party.” 

Lockett got up, pausing to fix Montclair with another one of the expressions. Like he would do anything about it, or like he wouldn’t come with. He went to the jukebox and proceeded to waste precious money that could be pooled toward drug purchases queuing up some Motown songs. The Red Anchor jukebox did have an enviable selection of Motown hits, Montclair considered as the needle dropped on “Don’t Leave Me This Way” — the superior Teddy Pendergrass version. 

Lockett came back and sat down and nodded kind of flirtily at Devon’s Aretha shirt. Montclair’s eye roll might have been seen from space. Devon smiled. “Get a room,” Montclair said. 

Lockett and Devon ignored him. He knew Lockett thought him incapable of the full spectrum of human feeling. He had said as much in not so many words. But then, Lockett’s capability was also manifestly lacking, which Montclair had not hesitated to remind him. “I love Harold Melvin,” Devon said. “ _If you don’t know me by now_ …” 

“Want to jam,” said Lockett. 

Devon looked at Montclair, like for permission. Montclair punched the table and got up to one-up Lockett’s jukebox picks. 

“You play drums, right?” Lockett asked Devon. 

“Yeah, sure. Just by myself. Sometimes I play along to records.” 

“Yeah,” said Lockett, “I play guitar along with records too.” 

Teddy Pendergrass was doing his whole vocal riffing “don’t leave me” thing and the waitress and the surly cooks were jamming out. Montclair watched them, seething, in the chromatic jukebox reflection. Lockett pushed the remaining food on his plate, which was a lot because he mostly only ate heroin, Devon-ward. 

Montclair queued up Depeche Mode’s “Hungry Like the Wolf,” though it didn’t come on until after all the Motown, by which point they were all out front on the sidewalk smoking a joint. 

“Oh, come on,” Lockett said, maybe twenty decibels louder than he customarily spoke, so that Devon looked shocked. 

“What,” said Devon. He shouldered Lockett playfully but Lockett didn’t go. He was a pretty immovable object given he weighed 130 pounds soaking wet. “Depeche Mode is cool, man.” 

\--

Montclair worked an early shift and drove aimlessly for a while, and eventually he found himself at the totem pole park at the edge of town. He had seen totem poles before as a child in various National Geographics and library books, and despite his general disinterest in visual art he found himself drawn to the wolf images in a few of the monuments. He stood for a few minutes in front of one such monument where the shadowy parts of the wolf’s face were painted in a delicate greenish blue, and eventually he felt someone behind him. It was a girl in a Van Halen shirt. “Hi,” she said. 

“Hi.” 

“Is that your car?” 

She pointed with derision at the Volvo. 

“Who wants to know?” 

She was too smart to play games. “Did you really drive all the way from Idaho in that thing?” 

Her name was Michelle. She was a student at college in Anchorage. She was working on boats — something to do with sonar and seafloor mapping that he didn’t understand — and intermittently crashing in Ketchikan. They went to one of the old seaman’s bars on the main drag that never seemed to close, because Michelle’s laundry was in the dryer at the laundromat next door. Eventually he realized what she was going to ask him, moments before she touched his upper arm with a casual gentleness and said, “Hey, could I get a ride home?” 

They drove north on the Tongass Highway. It was violently green. When the ocean appeared it nearly gave Montclair vertigo. It was just right there, like a perfect blue-glass sheet, and it went on and on and on beyond the flanking forested islands into a milky emptiness. Out into the strait to the north the low clouds were peeling off the distant islands in the unseen winds. Michelle, evidently having seen it all before, was bored. She lit a clove cigarette, and coughed, loosening her limbs to drape her body over the front seat, the dashboard, the center compartment, and half out the window. She had not said anything about the sleeping bags and scattered clothing and Coleman grill in the backseat, evidently having seen all that before too. “Did you drive up by yourself,” she asked. 

“Yep.” 

“Wow. Must have been lonely.” 

“Yeah,” said Montclair, looking out the window with what he hoped was an air of toughness. 

“You must like to be alone,” said Michelle.

“Yeah, you must like that too.” 

She watched him for a while, not saying anything. Then she said, “Yeah, I do.” 

They drove onward and he wondered if she was camping alone in the woods or squatting in an abandoned hunting cabin. The thought was kind of exciting. But then she said, “It’s a left just up here.” 

She had to be fucking kidding. Montclair turned down the driveway and the bower of pines tightened and loosened and revealed the sentient anthill sprawl of Devon’s house again. 

“You _live_ here?” 

The Volvo doors slammed and the sound echoed into the sound of the sea at the base of the bluff. 

“Yeah,” said Michelle, “it’s a house, people live in houses, Billy.” 

_House_ was maybe a strong word in this context. They went inside. Montclair carried Michelle’s laundry for her, and they went stumbling through the dark ramshackle halls tripping over clothing and mail and musical instruments and drug paraphernalia and car parts and bricks and shreds of non-slip rubber matting the residents must have employed in the wet months when the water table rose up through the fucking floor. Michelle’s room was nice except for the strip of flypaper in the corner which Montclair at first took for a strip of black crepe, so caked was it with dead and struggling greenhead flies. They were coming in through the widening gap between the window and the plywood sheeting that made up the wall, which Michelle was obliged to leave open for air circulation purposes. To wit, “Wanna smoke,” she said. 

Montclair hadn’t said no to an offered drug since he was twelve. Even at age eleven he had been pretty undiscerning. “Sure,” he said. 

She unearthed a resin-caked bong from under her bed and a sandwich bag of weed from a milk crate containing her underwear, where she had concealed it in a box of tampons evidently to keep it from the wandering eyes of predominately male stoner roommates. She packed the bong deftly and took the first hit. The fact that she hadn't offered it to him first was kind of a weird turn on, especially when combined with the look of her eyelashes and her freckles and her hollowed cheeks. She passed it to him. Their hands touched against the cool glass, and he tasted her menthol chapstick. 

\--

The ways to be loved when you were like this might have been pretty unfamiliar to the average person. Even worse, maybe there were no real ways to be loved and these ways were just ways of being something else. Montclair liked Michelle and for maybe about an hour felt kind of in love with her, especially when she believed the story he told about his scars, which was that he had been attacked by a bear as a child. He figured as an Alaskan she would have a kind of special sympathy for victims of bear maulings. Later he figured maybe she hadn’t believed him at all and rather knew he was lying but just didn’t care to find out the truth. That was always the thing. When there was this huge part of yourself — maybe, possibly, your entire self, as good as your entire self, an entire other self — about which you could not speak, because it was illegal in some states to make the disclosure, or otherwise because it was just sad and embarrassing, because of stigma, said the counselor at the werewolf registry; anyway, when you were obliged to leave this whole thing out, there could be no truth, because the lie-by-omission was like some kind of rot contagion. Montclair considered his mother, who had known about his condition, having driven him to the hospital, and being a squib from an old magic family, and who was glad he hadn’t died, because she needed help around the house and another paycheck to keep the electricity on, but who otherwise could not expend much sympathy, just didn’t have the bandwidth, even when she would come in the trailer on the mornings after the full moon to find the entire place a wreck and Montclair and Lockett lying in their own blood on opposite sides of the general devastation. “You boys better clean this up,” she would say, putting the coffee pot on and rubbing cocaine into her gums. Then she would go back outside to her lab to work. When he thought about it Montclair figured his mother hadn’t necessarily loved him before so it didn’t make any real sense she would after. He was a lot like his father, unfortunately. 

Lockett had been very loved by his parents until they had been told something at the hospital after everything and he had been forbidden from coming home again. This was hard for him for a while but then he got used to it. They were each other’s family now. That was what you had to do in these sorts of situations, because the blood one couldn’t be held to account when the shit hit the fan. You had to literally make your own. That he hadn’t killed Lockett that first full moon night, though he might easily have and statistically should have, seemed like proof positive they were supposed to be — whatever this was. Friends. Brothers. Intergalactic soldiers thrown together by circumstance on some hostile planet populated by strange creatures with skewed senses of empathy. They could never leave each other now, save in death. The complication of course being that they had nearly killed each other however many times, and that Montclair had started it, for which Lockett would never forgive him.

This thing precluded love, because this thing was everything. Encompassed inside it was a kind of gene-editing virus that swapped out basic tenants of human reality for an uncanny unfamiliar that bordered on eldritch horror. Sometimes, when really high, he could almost convince himself it was the superior way to be. In being arguably the most abject of god’s living creatures, if god was even involved at this chthonic juncture, they had somehow found their way around to look at the world from above again. 

\--

He woke up because someone slammed a sledgehammer of wailing feedback through his eardrums, the walls, and the very fabric of space and time. Beside him Michelle folded her pillow around her face and screamed into it. The drums cut in atonally, segmenting the living drone into a semblance of wobbling mummified rhythm. Montclair already suspected, but he knew it was Lockett when the guitar struck a skin-flaying D minor. He too grabbed the nearest pillow and groaned into it loudly. Michelle was halfway up and throwing on a melange of clothing from the floor, presumably in order to storm into the next room and chew out the musicians. Her bare back, where there was a little omnipresent bruise from her bra buckle against the monadnock of her center vertebra, evoked such a feeling in Montclair that he said “Michelle, hold on.”

She turned to him snappily, hair flying. “What?”

“Hold on,” Montclair shouted over the clatter of percussion. “Lie back down.” 

Warily, Michelle did, crossing her arms over her chest like a corpse. The light through the threadbare curtain smelled like rain. Montclair closed his eyes and focused as hard as he could into the feeling of the spell, trying to funnel a wedge of vengeful power into the next room. Over the years he and Lockett had learned, mostly out of books, magic that could be used strategically against one another. For instance, he used this one in the car when Lockett insisted on listening to a third straight hour of Gram Parsons-affiliated country projects. It was a little more complicated against fully amplified instruments than just against the shitty Volvo’s little cassette player, but after a few moments Montclair heard the music start to dim. When it was just whispers he opened his eyes and turned to Michelle. He felt like he’d sprinted some epic distance. Michelle looked at him, then at the wall. “Cool,” she said. “How’d you do that?”

“Dunno.” 

“You can just do that stuff?” 

He could’ve told her, your entire house is held up with that stuff so maybe you should ask Devon about it. Instead he said, “I dunno, yeah I guess.” 

Michelle thought that was cool. She kind of draped herself over his chest, which was nice except it was hot, he was hot from the exertion of the spell and she was hot, but her hair was cool. 

The spell started to wear off in about an hour or so, by which time Michelle was asleep again. Montclair listened for a while, watching the light move across the room, listening as the music seemed to fade in from elsewhere. They had gotten over the squalling and were playing real songs now: Montclair recognized “Cashing In” by Minor Threat. He found the melody and mouthed the words — “It's dog-eat-dog, ha-ha!” — and eventually Michelle wrapped her pillow around her head again and groaned. 

Devon played drums like the sounds of things breaking in a fire. Sharp crackling snaps and roars. Not that Montclair would ever admit this to anyone, but Lockett was really good at playing guitar. The aggressive manner of his playing was infuriating considering in person he was rarely very aggressive at all. It was like he put all the confrontationality he had to have had somewhere in his tiny angry body into this medium rather than into the way more fun medium where any other werewolf in their right mind would have put it. But Lockett wasn’t and had never really been quite in his right mind. Even before lycanthropy and before heroin his keel had been inhumanly even — except like this. He charged the guitar line onward like some doomed outmanned army just running helter-skelter at death and Devon raced to keep up. He didn’t overly lean on cymbal noise like a lot of other punk drummers Montclair had heard. Eventually he had to admit to himself he was impressed and got up, pulling on his pants from the floor, for a closer ear. 

Maybe they were trying to spite him. As soon as he got out into the hall the wash of noise began to fade. He nearly punched the wall. The sound dissipated into another funny sound which was Lockett’s kind of scary hacking laugh. 

“That was really good,” Montclair heard Devon say. He sounded out of breath. “You’re really good.” 

“You’re really good!” said Lockett. Maybe he even _exclaimed_ this. “Yeah. That was really good.” 

Montclair rolled his eyes with such consternation he felt them strain to be freed from his skull. 

“Do you ever write stuff?” Devon went on. “Like make things up yourself?” 

“Uh,” said Lockett, “just little licks, you know…” 

He played one, which was basically a ripoff of Wipers’ “Can This Be” and which Montclair had heard approximately ninety million times as the most frequent audience for Lockett’s practicing. 

“No fucking way, dude,” said Devon. The undercurrent of excitement in the perpetually stoned surfer-bro voice hollowed out the pit of Montclair’s stomach as though with a sharpened ice cream scoop. “That’s awesome.” 

“I mean, it’s basically a ripoff of ‘Can This Be’ by Wipers,” Lockett told him. 

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” Devon quoted. “Picasso said that.” 

“But do you write anything,” Lockett asked. 

“Yeah, I guess,” Devon said, “I have some lyrics. Poems and stuff.” 

“Poems?” said Lockett, a little incredulously, though nowhere near as incredulously as Montclair was thinking it in his head. 

“Yeah!” Devon laughed. “Poetry is really punk, dude.” 

“Sure,” said Lockett. But he sounded like he might want to be convinced. 

“Read _The Waste Land_ just one time, man… then we’ll talk.” 

“But do you write anything on the drums?” 

Devon launched into this insufferable jazzy solo. It went on for a stupidly long time, and then Lockett clapped kind of embarrassedly. More amicable laughter ensued. Montclair’s urge to punch through the wall was now more like some kind of prime directive. He lifted his fist and put as much power and fury into it, magical and otherwise, as he could stand, and then he gently tapped it against the flimsy plywood. Instead of huffing and puffing and et cetera he just went in through the hanging tapestry that constituted Devon’s door. 

The space inside was just about big enough for the bed, which was a twin mattress on the floor, the kit, which was about half a step above plastic sheets stapled to old barrels and cans, and the two boys, who startled at the sight of Montclair in the door. Lockett was wearing black overalls without any fish guts on them, and a Void shirt with short sleeves. Even in the dim light the scar wrapping up his arm was particularly damning. He crossed his arms over his chest and the guitar wailed. 

“No way, bro,” said Devon, clattering drums. He sounded legitimately thrilled by Montclair’s presence. “What’s up, man?” 

Montclair ignored him. “You two faggots sounded good in here,” he said. 

Devon ignored the slur. He didn’t even blink. “Yeah,” he said, “well, Lock really rips…” 

Lockett met Montclair’s eyes. A number of things might have happened, except that Lockett’s eyebrow moved infinitesimally up his forehead. Then he turned back to Devon and played that flaying D minor again. 

Devon shouted something Montclair couldn't quite make out over the hurricane of noise. Then he launched into a barrage of drumfire. Lockett dragged the chord shape up the neck of the guitar and choked the strings at the hilt of it into this keening, mourning tone. Just after the point at which it had become unbearable he scratched his nails back down the guitar neck, vibrating against the strings, and launched into a hard-charging punk riff. Devon picked it up instantly and dissected it like a frog with pins — otherwise like the way he cut up the fish on the line at the cannery — a sharp, shocking efficiency. 

Hanging over the top of it was — well, maybe not so much a melody. But a place to scream. 

Not without bitterness, Montclair found his initial plans compromised. 

\--

They left late, but it was still bright on the drive back down the Tongass Highway toward town. 

_We’ve known each other for, like, ever,_ Montclair thought Lockett must have told Devon. _We don’t even talk to each other anymore. Because there’s basically no point._

But Devon must have asked, _What happened to your arm?_

“What do you tell people,” he asked Lockett, nodding toward the scar. 

“Nobody asks,” Lockett told him. “It’s rude to ask.” 

“What would you say if somebody did ask?” 

“You know, here, I could say it happened working on a boat, somehow.” 

The ocean was a darker silver now with the light dying. “You always have to have a plan,” Montclair said. 

Lockett put his forehead against the window. His whole body moved when he did one of those deep stabilizing breaths he must have read about in some kind of self-help book or something. 

“How are we going to get that guy’s benzos,” Montclair went on. 

“Which guy?” 

“That guy that wants to suck your dick.” 

“Oh,” said Lockett, “right.” 

“You know what would be the easiest — ”

“For the love of fuck. No.” 

“Why not?” 

Lockett picked some of the cannery filth embedded there out from under his fingernails. The calluses at the pads of his fingers were red and bright from playing guitar, even in the dim light. “You go ahead and prostitute yourself, Billy,” he said. “I’m going to sleep.” 

When they got back to the trailhead parking lot, Lockett got out of the car and wandered into the woods to piss. Montclair watched his black clothes fade slowly into the darkness, and, when he was gone, locked the Volvo’s doors with the most powerful magic he could muster and set about preparing the last of their shared stash of junk for injection. 

He lay there on top of his sleeping bag, ascending to galaxies unknown. He was dimly aware of random space debris slamming against the windows of his craft and hostile alien beings attempting entry by subterfuge. None of it really mattered much, and after a little while he was home free. 

In the morning Lockett was nowhere to be found, and so was the other transient who parked in the lot. Montclair woke up slowly, wondering if this guy was presently dissecting Lockett in some robustly equipped apocalypse bunker all the way out the logging roads in the island’s remote interior, but when he drove down the hill to work he found Lockett already on the line in his same clothes from the night previous, roughly scraping innards by the handful out of the fish and onto the floor. On their first fifteen minute break Montclair cornered him by the water fountains. Lockett produced a sandwich baggie full of the transient’s benzos from the breast pocket of the black overalls and then hid them again. 

“Was that so bad,” said Montclair. 

“I put an idea in his head,” Lockett said. “He thinks. But.” 

“You did what?” 

“I made him think that we did,” said Lockett, as though even this fakery were a mortal humiliation. 

“How?” 

“How’d you do that unbreakable lock to keep me out of the car?” 

Montclair was not about to tell him that. Also, he wasn't exactly sure how he’d done it. Lockett folded his arms over his chest and shouldered past him brusquely enough to hurt. He was probably put out that he had had to go to work in his good overalls. 

Half the pills were promptly traded for the better stuff, and not a moment too soon. On lunch break, Devon dragged them to the payphone down the block from the Red Anchor and set them up with this guy who lived on a boat all the way at the south end of the Tongass Highway. The houseboat sat so low in the water that Montclair feared his and Lockett’s negligible added weight would put it under, and the kitchen alone was full of creepy ceramic animal figures with rosy cheeks. Montclair watched Lockett’s roving gaze case the place with an expression of mingled fear and nausea. Junk acquired, they drove up a logging road into the hills and shot up. It was quality shit, especially for its uncertain provenance. Eventually the hot air balloon descended Montclair’s astral soul back into his body and he discovered the sun at its deepest dip and the forest breathing and shouting as one single organism and Lockett lying on his back in the gully between the woods and the road, staring at the sky. 

The rest of the pills were saved for the Saturday night party. The moon approached. They were running out of needles. The smells at work seemed worse than usual, drugs wore off quicker, and Lockett mostly chewed the inside of his lip instead of speaking — all customary symptoms of the approaching inevitability. Some of the girls from the cannery invited them down to an abandoned dock to swim at night, but there would have been too much explaining to do what with the myriad of collective scars, so they went and found a place of their own instead, halfway to Ward Cove, and swam late at night when the omnipotent sun was lowest, silent except for the drone of wind and waves, until their hands and feet were numb. 

\--

\--

\--

[ When Lockett came out of the woods, he tried for about ten minutes to get into the car. He tried with magic and with force. He even threw a heavy rock at the back window but it bounced off and landed hard on his foot. 

The source of the twisting in his gut was uncertain. It could have been any number of things. There was a light on in the other van that usually parked in the lot, spilling out of a gap in the heavy moth-eaten curtain the guy had strung up over one of the side windows for nighttime privacy. Lockett thought he remembered this guy called himself by some hippie sobriquet but couldn’t quite remember what it was. Regardless he went and steeled himself and knocked on the van’s back door. It swung open almost instantly. Looking into this guy’s red-rimmed blue eyes Lockett remembered he called himself Aster. 

“Lockett,” Aster said with mild surprise. 

“Hi.” 

“Hi yourself. What can I do you for?”

Lockett shouldered toward the Volvo. Logically he knew for this to work he had to make himself appear extremely vulnerable, but that was hard if you spent your every waking hour trying to perform as a person frozen to stone by a basilisk. “He locked me out, and, um, it’s raining — ” 

“Want to come in?”

“If it’s — I mean, only if it’s no trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” said Aster. He threw the door wide and Lockett climbed in under his arm. Inside was lit in a soft gold glow by a battery-operated camping lantern. It smelled violently of patchouli and everything was tie-dyed. 

“Are you fixing,” said Aster, shutting the doors behind them, “because I have — well, not the real thing. But it’ll take the edge off.” 

“Um — ”

“I don’t want anything for it. Just don’t want you sick.” 

He materialized an orange pill bottle from nowhere and pressed it into Lockett’s hand. It was methadone prescribed to someone named John Fijalkowski. Lockett opened the bottle and shook one out and tried to surreptitiously inspect it for impurities but it looked fine. He swallowed the pill in his hand, and then Aster handed him a beat-up old Nalgene full of water to wash it down. 

“You’re smart with your rainwater collecting,” Aster said. 

Lockett realized Aster had probably been watching him wandering around the hilltop neighborhood in the grey un-night draining the contents of his rainwater cassettes into gallon bottles he found in dumpsters. Vulnerability, he reminded himself. “They shut off the water where we used to live,” he said. “In Idaho. Um, they’re easy to make. And free. And it rains all the time, so.” 

He tried something wobbly on his face like the best smile he could do. He was really bad at this. Aster smiled at him sensitively like one of those nice guys on public access TV — Mister Rogers or Bob Ross. 

“You boys are from Idaho?” 

Lockett knew he had explained this before. “Between Boise and Lewiston,” he said. 

“Fly fishing country.” 

“You bet.” 

“You ever try your luck out there?” 

_I literally had to or we’d starve_ , Lockett didn’t say. “Um — ”

Maybe Aster knew this was the wrong line of questioning. So he pivoted to an even worse one. “You’re a water sign, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, um, Cancer.” 

“Your birthday — ” 

“It happened already. June 24.” 

“Right around the solstice.” 

Lockett buried his head in his hands. “Yeah,” he said. 

In the silence he heard music from somewhere — maybe from the van stereo, maybe from the Volvo across the lot. The telltale beguiling tones of “Do It Again” by Steely Dan. _In the morning you go gunning for the man who stole your water…_

“You don’t like talking about yourself, kid,” Aster noted. 

“I really don’t.” 

“Why not?” 

A sound escaped Lockett’s mouth. Kind of a funny laugh thing. Aster looked kind of proud of himself to have evinced it. “I don’t know,” Lockett said. “I’m not much.” 

“Not much what?” 

“Not much anything.” 

Aster’s brow tightened. Lockett braced himself for a whole hippie lecture on the meaning of the jewel of life breathed into you by the holy universe, et cetera. But instead Aster just said, “I think you’re something.” 

“Ha.” 

“I think your friend makes you think you’re garbage.” 

This whole hippie thing was making it easy to be vulnerable. Lockett put his hand over his mouth and looked toward the door. Counting motes of dust. He let heat come into his eyes and underneath his chin. 

“You’re a very special person, Lockett,” said Aster. “Just like your name. And befitting a Cancer. A little box of memories.” 

This was completely overwhelmingly stupid. “The pills you were talking about the other day,” Lockett said, disturbed by the shakiness of his own voice. “I want to buy them.” 

Aster only looked a little put out by the change of tone. “The benzodiazepines? Sure — I’ll sell ‘em to you.” 

“What’ll it cost me?” 

Aster pretended he was thinking. Finally he said, “Just come over here and lie down.” 

“What?” 

“I’m not going to hurt you.” 

Lockett bit the inside of his lip hard and went. He felt kind of dizzy with wanting to cry. On this side of the van Aster had assembled a makeshift bed with blankets and pillows and that funny egg foam. He laid down. His heart was fairly trying to jump out his body through whichever route might be easiest — throat, mouth, chest cavity… For a single precious moment he thought maybe this would just be it. Then Aster touched his hair and he flinched. 

“It’s alright, pretty,” said Aster. “Stay still.” 

He shut his eyes tightly and let the dew in his eyelashes congeal and slip over his nose. He was upset with himself for being so trusting. He had allowed himself to be manipulated and groomed and cajoled into this situation and now he had to dig himself out of the hole before something really bad happened. Montclair probably would have killed the guy but Lockett didn’t think he could kill anyone. All the books were pretty clear that you had to really mean it for those sorts of spells to work. If only there was some way to fake it… 

_ARE YOU MAGIC OR WHAT_ , something screamed from some box in the back of his mind where lots of things were locked up. 

He didn’t even want to think about what would happen if this didn’t work. The pill he’d taken was starting to settle him to the extent he almost couldn’t think about it. It existed as a pure hypothetical somewhere out of mind, even as he felt the van shift under the sinuous movement of Aster shifting above him. Things were kind of salty-blurry when he opened his eyes but this other person on top of him — the hot breath — developed pretty quick, like a Polaroid. Lockett reached up and touched Aster’s shoulder and moved his hand to his sweat-sticky neck. This movement spurred the hippie’s own exploratory touch to move from Lockett’s hair toward his collar. 

Lockett thought as hard as he could until the thought was like a golden ball inside whose glimmering tangles was contained some fucked up softcore porn taped off a bad VHS. He pushed this thought from his mind into reality, into his hand. Then he flattened the thought through Aster’s skin at the back of his neck. 

The hippie collapsed on top of him with a shuddering yell. Lockett gritted his teeth and eyes and limbs everything gritted right up into a kind of terrible knot. The knot lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. The knot had been tied at the very beginning of space and time to keep some very important vessel from drifting away from some very important dock and the millennia of salt spray had entombed it as though in amber. At last it was frayed loose enough to break by apocalyptic nuclear winds, and he shifted out from under Aster, breathing hard. He flattened himself against the side of the van, trying not to look like it was out of fear or whatever. 

“You’re something,” Aster said, rolling over onto his back. His eyes twinkled kind of sinisterly in Lockett’s direction. “You’re really something.” 

“Haha,” Lockett said. “Sure. Yeah.” 

“Pills are in the wheel well,” Aster said. “Behind you.” 

There were maybe fifty of them in a grungy sandwich bag wrapped in a blue bandanna. Lockett put them in the breast pocket of his overalls and snapped it shut. “Thanks,” he said. 

“Thank _you_ , boy,” Aster said. Then he fell asleep. 

Lockett sat against the side of the van wide awake until morning. The pill kind of spread out inside him into a pure white nothingness and through his knees pressed to his chest he could incrementally feel his heartbeat slow down. When he left at dawn, not that dawn looked any different than any other hour of the day, he took the orange bottle of methadone tablets with him too. Then he walked down the hill to the cannery. Luckily he had his tape player with him in another one of the overalls pockets, so he put on his cassette of Wipers’ _Over the Edge._

Devon was at the Red Anchor. “You look like death,” he said. 

“I am death,” Lockett told him, not really remembering where this quotation was from, some history book or something, “the destroyer of worlds.” 

They drank their coffees quickly and then went around back and each took one of the methadone pills from the orange bottle. Beneath them the quiet morning ocean lapped against the seawall and the pier. “How’d you get these?” Devon asked. 

“It’s not edifying to say.” 

He was kind of joking, or he was until Devon gently hugged him. He flinched and Devon pulled away. He settled for patting Lockett’s shoulder. 

They walked together toward work. “Montclair locked me out of the car,” Lockett explained. 

“Can’t you just — ” Devon snapped his fingers into a spark. 

“I tried — he did something. I don’t know.” 

“Is he like really good at.” Devon hesitated. He didn’t like calling it what it was, which was kind of endearing. “Magic.”

“No. But he, like… it explodes sometimes. It’s more powerful when you do it like that I think.” 

“Where did you sleep?” 

Lockett gritted his teeth. “I didn’t,” he said. 

Devon patted Lockett’s shoulder again. “You can always come to my place.” 

“Thanks, Dev, but I mean, it’s pretty far…” 

“Well, you can call me and I’ll come get you.” 

This was a truly shocking pronouncement. “You have a phone?” Devon just laughed, so Lockett went on. With the methadone pill and the coffee he was starting to feel better. “Those cars in the lot, like, actually drive?” 

“How do you think I get to work?” 

“I’ve never seen you driving!” 

“I park up on the hill,” said Devon, through laughter, “because it’s so embarrassing.” 

It was funny to feel light with happiness and also solid like a real person that other people could see. It was almost unbearably ticklish, in that under the good feeling was something kind of bad. 

“I don’t think you should have this party on Saturday,” Lockett said. 

“What? Why!”

“Just because.” 

“It’ll be fine. Is it about the house? We’ve had parties before.” 

“It’s not about the house. Just trust me.”

They were waiting at a stoplight. Nobody jaywalked in Alaska. The sun was starting to bleach the thin grey clouds out and the bright summer blue was almost visible. “Do you want to tell me something, Lock,” Devon said, a little carefully, as though the moment in which such a question might be posed was like dew or a butterfly, or deer in the brush. 

“Not right now,” Lockett told him. He had a plan, and he wasn’t sure it was a good one, or a workable one, or a metaphysically possible one, but selfishly he knew it was better than the alternative, which was honesty. 

“So you want me to cancel this party that everyone’s coming to where you can unload those pills and make hundreds of dollars because of something you can’t tell me about? Yet?” 

“Um,” said Lockett. “Yeah.” 

Devon shook his head. “Sometimes I totally can’t believe you man,” he said. ] 

\--

\--

\--

Moonrise on Saturday the sixteenth was at eleven fifty-eight PM, Montclair discovered in a sailor’s almanac at the public library. He didn’t share this information with Lockett for strategic reasons, but Lockett found out on his own by going to the public marina on lunch break and negotiating with a few of the loitering deckhands. They slept in and made mayonnaise sandwiches for breakfast in the new parking lot on the north edge of town where they camped now that Lockett refused to go back to the original one, and then they went to the nice laundromat that had showers and cleaned up and washed some clothes, reading tabloids in the creaky plastic chairs, wet hair dripping, flanked by long-haul shipping vessel workers as the single load of clothing they had between them spiraled with soap suds in the machine. They started up the Tongass Highway toward Devon’s around 8pm, when the sky was still noon-bright blue. 

When they arrived the whole clumsy plywood contraption of the house was shaking with the raw bass tones of Iggy Pop’s “Fall In Love With Me” conducted through the marrow and the ether by the magically rigged PA. Inside was about ten degrees warmer than out and smelled like weed and smoke and body odor and an omnipresent fishiness indicating the presence of people who worked at the cannery. Someone had ordered a couple of pizzas which were congealing grease on a jerry-rigged sawhorse table in a corner of the kitchen, and a few handles of bottom-shelf liquor were perched on the counter above a cooler full of melted ice water and floating pissy beers. Montclair and Lockett poured shots of bourbon and chased them with Rainier tallboys from the cooler. Then they went out again into the living room to attempt to pawn off some of the hippie transient’s benzos. 

Michelle was by the record player smoking a joint. Montclair went over and showed her his wares. They went back together to her room so she could get her cash from her purse and stow a few pills away in her tampon box. He tried to kiss her, but because of the impending lunar event everything kind of tasted funny, especially her menthol chapstick, and besides she kind of turned her head away so that he kissed her ear. They went back out together into the party. “Who else do you think might want some,” he asked her. He was determined to outdo Lockett on this front. 

Michelle indicated some friends across the party, who Montclair recognized from the bars in town. She disappeared to find another record to put on, and Montclair went over to her girlfriends only to find Lockett had gotten there already. One of these girls literally undid one of the buckles of Lockett’s black overalls, ignoring the corpsey rigidification of his entire body, to affirm he was wearing a Dead Kennedys shirt. He unearthed the bag of pills from his pocket and let the girls dig their favorites out of it like candy and tuck fivers into his overalls as though they were at some really fucked up strip club. 

Montclair thought about going over and leaning against the wall in such a way as to show off his arm muscles, which were looking pretty good from wrestling the huge salmon around on the line at work, and saying something like, ladies, this young man may look cute and tender but he’s terrified of sex… and I’m not! 

Instead Michelle came back over, having put on the B-52s. “You wanna dance,” she said. 

“I don’t dance.”

“Everybody dances.” 

She shimmied her body against his side. If he wasn’t so enraged, for all these kind of amorphous reasons that were rapidly converging into some big thunderstorm, he probably would have taken her up on it. Instead he watched Lockett make his way through the crowd toward Devon, who was sitting on the couch talking with animated longing to the prettiest girl at the party and possibly in Ketchikan, Amber who was Haida from Graham Island and managed the phone lines at the private marina. Lockett sat down on the couch beside them and Devon put his arm around Lockett’s shoulders and Amber shook his hand. 

“Do you want to dance with Amber,” Michelle asked him. Not even jealously — as though she might even set it up for him if he asked nicely. When Montclair didn’t respond Michelle said, “Maybe you want to dance with Lockett?”

How did she even know his name? On the stereo Cindy Wilson was shouting. _Walk, talk in the name of love…_

“You just look really — something,” Michelle went on, totally unsolicitedly. “Maybe sad.” 

“I am _not_ sad,” said Montclair, but his head was kind of starting to hurt between the eyes. 

“You’ll feel better if you dance with me.” 

She meant it. He could see it inside her face. There was some well of something there — some warm truth, reaching out for him, and he almost touched it. But there was only so much meaning it that could be done, only so much truth that could be had, without the secret. 

“I don’t dance,” Montclair told her, sharpening his voice. “Fuck off.” 

For a moment Michelle just looked stunned. Even in his periphery, because he had started scanning the party and pretending he was unbothered, he could see the open light in her face close. By the time she came around from her shock he had started to approach some potential buyers, but he wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t hear Michelle say, “Asshole.” 

Lockett had been quicker than him and a more efficient salesman, having already managed to ingratiate himself within the house and Devon’s social circle. He had sold all his pills and was posted up by the record player queuing up all the subsequent B-52s albums with Amber and Michelle, debating Clash records and laughing excessively over now-lukewarm cans of Rainier. Montclair made seemingly endless rounds of the party and couldn’t manage to unload the last third of his baggie of benzos owing to everybody already being supremely fucked up. Around eleven he went outside and pissed pointedly against the side of the house. He could feel the moon under the earth, not far now, stretching out and pulling something toward it, like a magnet wrapped around every drop of blood. His heart kicked up. He went back inside to scout the party and position himself optimally. He’d never done it with so many people around before and he felt almost terrified, and almost unbearably excited. 

He was eyeing a corner by the door to the kitchen when Devon approached him, crossfaded, slurring. “Billy,” he said, clapping Montclair’s upper arms in a kind of wary embrace. “Man.” 

Montclair just smiled, hiding his teeth. His mind could not quite form a response beyond the urge to open his mouth as wide as possible. 

“Can I just say.” Devon leaned in close over the party noise. His breath smelled like beer and the whites of his eyes were bright red. This would be easy after all, Montclair thought. This close he could see the freckle in Devon’s eye, and that he had missed a few hairs at his jaw the last time he’d shaved. “I’m really glad to have met you guys. Just really glad you’re here. And I know — well. I just gotta say. _Mi casa… es tu_.”

He was missing half the idiom, but Montclair didn’t really have the mental faculty left to point it out. Thankfully they were interrupted by the arrival of another purgatorial monstrosity. Lockett’s hand rested on Montclair’s shoulder with precisely zero comfort, like the landing claw of a vulture. 

“There he is,” Devon crowed, ruffling Lockett’s hair with a clammy, trembling hand. 

“Hi, Dev,” Lockett said. Like this — measuring words out by teaspoon — his voice sounded almost younger. “Can you excuse us for a second.” 

Lockett steered Montclair toward the perfect corner, and for a moment the unbearable excitement ratcheted up as though cranked by a wrench. He was finally going to let them do this together — but then Lockett kept walking, into the hallway. Montclair dug his heels, quite literally, into the rotting floorboards. 

“I need a hit,” Lockett said. “Come on.” 

“You go. I’m not going.” 

“You want to do this on top of that?” 

Moonset was at seven AM. One didn’t necessarily need a sextant or a spreadsheet to calculate that by the time of the reverse transformation they would both be unsettlingly close to the onset of withdrawal symptoms. 

“Just a little one,” said Montclair. He wanted his wits about him. 

“A little one,” Lockett agreed. 

It took them a few precious minutes to find an empty room that nobody was having sex in. There were no windows and no switches or bulbs, so Lockett threw a magical light into the air, illuminating a storage space full of expired canned vegetables and destroyed furniture. It’d do. He magically locked the door and then crouched and took the works out of his overalls. The junk they’d gotten from the guy on the houseboat looked like brown sugar. “Just a little one,” Montclair reminded him, sitting against the door. 

Lockett looked up with the flint-chips expression. The imminently-murderous expression. Something else inside Montclair recognized it — recognized him — and seethed. Those two really hated each other and it only got steeped like tea into these human bodies. 

They shared the needle as they had a million times. Montclair went first, and then Lockett carefully cleaned the point with an alcohol pad and went second. The seething calmed. The light above them dimmed and fluttered and breathed in time with Lockett’s consciousness. It took a minute for Montclair to gather his scattered pieces enough to realize what else this meant, and another minute for him to get to his feet and try the door, only to find he couldn’t open it. 

Lockett had reclined into one of the piles of canned vegetables. “You can’t,” he said woozily. “Not worth trying.” 

“Can't what?” 

“Open it.” 

Montclair grabbed the rusted iron doorknob and shook it. He braced a hand against the frame and tugged the knob with the other, and then he went so far as to try to shove his fingers into the crack between the door and the wall. He tried with magic, and then he grabbed a can of corn from the floor and beat it against the knob. 

“You can’t open it,” Lockett said again. Montclair stormed over to him and lifted him to his feet by the collar of the Dead Kennedys shirt. Lockett kneed him in the crotch and then punched him in the face, so he grabbed Lockett by the throat and threw him against the wall. More cans rained onto the ground from the sloppy decaying shelves, and Montclair tripped on one and went sprawling out onto the floor. Lockett came stumbling over and kicked him hard in the stomach, and Montclair grabbed his ankle and pulled it out from under him. He struggled up and reached for the door again, but Lockett tripped him and he fell. 

_After all I’ve fucking done for you_ , Montclair couldn’t help but think, tasting blood. Lockett struggled to his feet and planted himself in front of the door, choking air. _After all I’ve fucking done for you, you won’t let either of us have the best fucking part of it…_

It kept on going like this for a seemingly interminable time, and at some point they stopped being people. 

\--

What happened, as he later found out, was this. The music blaring from the PA and the shouts and laughter of all the party attendees had covered up the sounds of transformation and the subsequent typical struggle and attempted mutual destruction that happened whenever they were alone together on the full moon. Lockett might nearly have gotten away with it, except at six AM it was full bright day, but the moon was still up, and everybody had gone home, so Devon turned the music off. Probably he had been wondering where they were, because they had disappeared around midnight but their car was still parked amidst the junkyard wreckage out front. Anyway, he turned the music off and they must have still been going at it. Montclair wondered if it sounded more like fucking or a nature documentary or both. Devon went to the locked door and tested it. He was still pretty new to the idea of the existence of magic, and he was extremely crossfaded and had dropped a tab of medium quality acid about three hours previous, such that Lockett eventually had to explain to him, yes that was really us. Of course he didn’t think to protect himself, which was what Montclair had been banking on. Lockett’s spell had been a variant on an ancient crypt protection curse and had been tied to Montclair specifically, so Devon broke it hardly trying. Then he opened the door. 

They both came screaming out tumbling limbs. Evidently it was a little different than usual because of the un-night problem. They all three went running out into the yard, and Devon put up an alright chase, because he had been a junior varsity track champion at one time. This unfortunately explained why the body count wasn’t quite what Montclair had hoped it would be. (He was kind of wishing he’d also get Michelle, but maybe that was too much to hope for.) 

The actual crux moment itself, otherwise the moment of consummation if Montclair thought about it privately, otherwise the bite as it was clinically referred to, Montclair thought he could almost remember. The tantalizing nearness of this event to mind was so titillating it made him fantasize for a while about never leaving Alaska so that he might work out a way to game his condition and the midnight sun into being able to do it all consciously. It must have been very near the moment of moonset and the change. The almost-memory was like flipping slides on a projector. He had filled the rest of it in with imagination, like coloring outside the lines in a book. The light — the sun. Unclear if the creature had ever felt sun. Only so much time because of the sun. Could smell fear, which he could almost do as a human anyway. Tracked it to the person in the yellow shirt under one of the parts-stripped junkers in the yard. This person threw sparks at him, which was charmingly pathetic. He reached underneath — something bowled him over. He and this other mangy rangy animal squared off in the dirt. But there was only so much time. 

He would have thrown the horrible thing which was usually Lockett against the car. That would explain the dent in the rear passenger side door. Reached back into Devon’s hiding place and pulled him out by means of claws hooked in the fabric of his jeans. 

The sweetness of the subsequent moment. Better than any other equivalent suggestion of making someone yours. Like, total rightness. All the screaming basically precluding the need for any music ever to exist again. The blood basically precluding the need for any other sustenance. 

This action basically precluding the fact the same thing had ever been done to you. Of course there was no cure. It was only about as good as heroin was for palliative pain. But heroin was really good for that. 

Then the moon set. 

\--

Years later when they were asked about this by the Seattle punk rags and owl order zines and random teenagers at merch tables across the northwest, Lockett would usually answer the question of how they got the band together with something along the lines of, we all worked together at a salmon cannery in Ketchikan, Alaska. This wasn’t technically true because they didn't meet Royce until that fall, a few weeks after driving down the British Columbian coast and breaking out of desperation into the abandoned Eastlake warehouse right off I-5 that eventually became the squat known as the Den. Royce had been easier than Devon and Lockett, Montclair reflected sometimes, but because of that probably less fun. He had just been their dealer until he had figured it out. 

The near-fiction of the salmon cannery had more of a poetic, mythic cast befitting a punk band from the northwest in the years before it became cool to be a punk band from the northwest. Lockett cared about things like symbols and narratives, which was why he had said they should call the band Terrormancy as a kind of dark pun on the obscure practice of reading land for magical history. He privately claimed to have done this on the Montclair property outside Riggins and identified human bones, which was silly because Montclair had put his father’s corpse in lots of different places and there was no way someone like Lockett could perform such complex magic. But none of them could think of anything better so it stuck. Montclair mostly cared that the narrative of their origins cleaved closely to the bare fact of noise-as-vengeance, though he struggled to think about what exactly he felt vengeful toward. The vengeance was general. It fired indiscriminately like a dropped machine gun in an action movie. It took no prisoners. It just obliterated. Lockett said it came from jealousy. He could be very philosophical when stoned. 

Montclair felt good standing in front of people. He felt good being stared at and being watched. Beside him Lockett turned into his amp and evinced from it some horrible flaying blinding noise echoing the bone-ash nothingness of their very souls. He struck the guitar and Devon struck the drums into something that could just maybe if they made it big enough bowl the entire world flat. Montclair gathered all the rage extant on earth into his body. He looked out at all these fucking people like an astronaut. He thought, When are you going to give me what I deserve? Humanity, world, universe, god, gods, when are you going to give me what I deserve?

\--

He woke up in the yard. It smelled like blood and dirt. He felt exhausted with total satisfaction. Before he opened his eyes he stretched out every limb as he did every morning. Then he peeled his eyes open and beheld the sky, which was like an unfolded prismatic jewel. The high breeze — the pines swaying. He already mostly understood what had happened, but he propped himself up on his elbows to survey the scene. He was naked and looked like he had spilled an entire spaghetti dinner all over himself, which was a good sign. 

Across the yard amongst the piles of old cars Lockett had somehow got his legs under him. For the nth time Montclair cursingly respected his dogged ability to survive. Being thrown against the car had sliced his scalp open at the back of his skull and it was bleeding through his hair down his neck. He crouched and wrestled Devon’s limp body up against the deep wheel well of the really fucked up Jeep. This far away Montclair couldn’t see his facial expression, which was regrettable. 

He sat up and checked the residual sharpness of his teeth with a bloody finger. Across the lawn Lockett was saying something and patting Devon’s face. “Just hit him,” Montclair shouted. His voice grated inside the shredded box of throat. Lockett went stiff in the shoulder and jaw and didn’t say anything at all. 

He wasn’t really sure how far he could take this, but it was going okay, Montclair thought, lying back down in the grass again and waiting for the screaming to start. Now all he needed was a bass player. 

**Author's Note:**

> this story is named after the tune by [wipers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6_FaFegnxw) ... lockett's favorite band. i wrote this mostly on the subway while listening to yo la tengo's ["pass the hatchet"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4aCYqg44o4). 
> 
> ketchikan is located on tlingit land in southeast alaska. the red anchor was a real restaurant when i visited in summer 2014 (unforgettable breakfast) but it doesn't appear to be there anymore. this story is dedicated to all my old coworkers when i worked retail in seattle, who will never read this, who all told me incredible stories about working extremely dangerous jobs as teenagers at salmon canneries in the eighties.


End file.
